With ongoing advances in technology, digital media has become the dominant and preferred form of media. Accordingly, personal media libraries are increasingly becoming a major part of daily life for many individuals. Many users amass music, photos, and videos in digital form for use on their electronic devices, such as smartphones, computers, and personal media players. One common user task is collecting items from such personal media libraries for a specific purpose. For example, users may desire to curate and share photographs with friends, family, and colleagues. In another example, users may compose video-clips and photographs into a video presentation.
There currently exist software applications that allow a user to edit and organize one or more images into an organized format for presentation. For example, some applications allow a user to create slideshows, albums or photo books from digital images from the user's personal media library.
Some applications assist the user in the manual creation of digital slideshows, albums or photo books. Generally, these applications provide the user with a straightforward means of accomplishing the basic task of image organization and slide/page layout. For example, a user may be able to manually configure most, if not all, aspects of the slideshow or photo book, such as selecting suitable images, selecting the desired layout and theme for each slide/page, selecting specific images for each slide/page, adding text within any desired slide/page and rearrange the images and text within each slide or page. Although these applications allow a user to create and configure a slideshow or photo book to their exact specifications, manual creation of the slideshow or photo book may be difficult and may generally require a large amount of user time and interaction. Therefore, the task is less likely to be completed due to the significant amount of time and effort required to accomplish it.
Some applications offer automated functions for assisting the user in the creation of slideshows or photo books with minimal input from the user. Some automated applications still allow a user to manually select images to include in certain slides/pages and annotate the images by entering text, or other data, describing the images. Furthermore, some automated applications may only require a user to select a collection from which desired images are to be retrieved, and the application will automatically select and format images to include in the slideshow or photo book. One common approach to automated layout is the use of templates. In this approach, predefined layouts with empty areas are filled in with user images. Thus, the size, placement, rotation, and framing of the images on the page are predetermined. A user merely needs to specify which images should be placed in which empty area to complete a slide/page. Templates may provide a straightforward and working solution to the layout problem. However, this solution is somewhat limiting as the choice of layouts is bounded by the collection of available templates. Generally, variation in page layout design can only be achieved by the addition of new templates.
Although automated applications generally provide a simplified means of creating a slideshow or photo book with minimal input from the user, automated applications have some associated drawbacks. For example, one challenge in automated generation of slide/page layouts is allowing a level of creativity in the layouts produced. In particular, automated applications are limited in that such applications do not allow user input during creation of certain aspects of the slideshow or photo book, thus resulting in a slideshow or photo book that fails to meet a user's desired configuration or design and may further require user editing. Additionally, automated creation of slideshows and photo books may not provide users with a sense of accomplishment based on the fact that the slideshow or photo book is not tailored to the user's desired configuration and layout.